Chapters 1-4 Summary and Analysis

The first chapter is dedicated to the author's introduction to Arkady Volchok, the Australian who had worked as a teacher for the Aboriginals in a settlement in Walbiri country and who became Chatwin's first teacher of the Aboriginal Songlines. Volchok had admired the character of the natives and so dedicated himself to learning from them everything he could about their Aboriginal version of creation in which they sang the things they saw into existence. He was eventually allowed to learn their most secret rites and later was betrayed by an anthropologist who exposed those secrets out of jealousy of Volchok's friendship with the natives. Volchok left his position as an Aboriginal teacher to explore the world. He fell in love while he was in Europe but began to see the world away from the Aboriginals as shallow, so he...